#2576 - Dr. Peter McCullough

You might’ve been the first guy to get me canceled over COVID—either you or Malone. Suddenly the White House, CNN, everybody came down on me over “misinformation” that, in my view, wound up being true. We hadn’t sat down in five years. What’s that stretch been like for you?

Before 2020, “misinformation” wasn’t a medical-literature category. Then it became a formal label, a scale, a weapon. Call somebody misinformation and you’ve already claimed the moral high ground. We were naïve; we didn’t see that machinery coming.

I never imagined plainly talking about facts could become dangerous. What got me was that the television people, officials, and even people I know who got vaccine-injured rarely said, “I was wrong.” There was no correction and certainly no apology.

Big institutions don’t apologize when the stakes are enormous—think war. The pandemic was framed as a war: a virus invaded, government offered “countermeasures,” and doctors and nurses became the foot soldiers. I made the best clinical calls I could, and then I got in deep trouble.

That was the unprecedented-looking part: doctors facing punishment or license threats for treatments they believed helped patients. Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin became radioactive, even with studies and international examples people pointed to as evidence.

It happened worldwide with astonishing speed. I watched policies materialize, then authorities use them for professional reprisal. Companies researching nasal sprays, gargles, or vitamin D were pursued too. To me, the question was: how did so many countries adopt the same posture all at once?

Yeah, that’s the part I can’t get past. The world doesn’t agree on much. So what aligned all these governments around the same restrictions, the same dismissal of treatments, and the same one-size-fits-all answer?

My view is a biopharmaceutical complex had been building: global health bodies, foundations, regulators, pharmaceutical suppliers, and firms positioned to profit from testing, protective gear, delivery, and vaccines. I don’t see drugmakers as the only drivers; I see an aligned pandemic apparatus built around mass vaccination.

And then there’s the origin question. I think the virus escaped by accident—research, bad safety practice, somebody gets sick, and it’s out. I’ve been inside the Galveston lab with the moon suits and hoses. If people suddenly got sick on that island, I wouldn’t start by blaming a fish market.

Exactly. These labs handle contagious pathogens and depend on meticulous containment. I found the Wuhan investigation extraordinary: people connected to related research were involved in judging whether the virus came from the lab. That doesn’t inspire confidence in an independent inquiry.

The public response got surreal—Australia and New Zealand especially. Five-kilometer boundaries as if a virus respects a line on a map, masks outdoors, masks in pools. At some point masks became a tribal badge, not just a health measure.

We built a vocabulary of accusations: misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, anti-science, anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist. I prefer “rational theorist.” With a new virus, nobody starts with certainty; we form explanations, test them, and revise them. Clinical medicine works through inference, not permanent consensus.

Right. Science that can’t tolerate questioning isn’t science. Panic created what Malone called mass-formation psychosis: people got terrified, were offered one solution, and ambiguity became unacceptable. Friendships and families got rearranged over it.

Vaccination became ideology—almost religion, in my view. Fear of infectious disease is ancient, and early inoculation was described in sacred terms, even as a gift from God. That history helps explain the zeal: power, fear, money, and a conviction that medical intervention can improve on nature.

I kept coming back to natural immunity. If you’ve recovered, why insist you join the team anyway? I asked that directly after I had COVID, and nobody gave me an answer that made sense. It felt less medical than symbolic: put on the bandage, show you belong.

The original trials excluded people with prior infection, then policy abruptly treated everybody as eligible. I believe that reflects a greater-good ideology: everyone must participate even if individual benefit is doubtful. Pregnancy disturbed me most, because new interventions normally demand extreme caution there.

Meanwhile, monoclonal antibodies worked for people I knew but became strangely hard to obtain. When I got COVID, I told people what I used and got hammered for it. Then calls flooded in: somebody’s uncle, friend, comic, relative was sick. I paid to send nurses and treatments all over the country.

I used monoclonals hundreds of times and thought they were remarkably effective. Yet hospitalized patients often didn’t receive them, and then authorized products vanished as variants changed. My criticism is simple: if mutation disqualified treatments, why were mandates still tied to vaccines designed for the original strain?

The ivermectin attack was especially gross. Calling a human medicine “horse dewormer,” the fake Rolling Stone hospital story, CNN turning my face green—it was propaganda. I think people feared that workable treatments would weaken vaccine compliance.

I saw censorship across platforms, agencies, and journals. In my account, early-treatment papers and protocols were challenged or retracted while vaccine-favorable work got a smoother path. I maintain early combination treatment, including monoclonals and drugs such as ivermectin, could have prevented many deaths; that is my testimony and my conclusion.

I almost took the Johnson and Johnson shot through the UFC. Then healthy people around me had strokes, heart problems, and pacemakers, and I stopped. I wasn’t previously vaccine-hesitant at all. Later, my family got COVID while I barely felt it, and that made the official terror story feel even stranger.

I think every intervention has risks and benefits, and the public needed room to say, “I don’t know yet.” Instead, there was overconfidence before long-term data existed. The trials were short, transmission still occurred, and yet employers, sports leagues, and government moved toward mandates.

The PCR issue fed the hysteria too. If you run enough cycles, you can manufacture positives. Then hospitals had incentives to classify cases and deaths as COVID. That’s terrifying, because financial rewards can distort judgment precisely when people are scared.

We needed confirmation testing and honest accounting. Hospitals should also have compared outcomes, learned from one another, and explained their protocols. Instead, nobody wants to stand up and say, “We had the best results,” which tells me the institutional response deserves real scrutiny.

So after all of that, what did speaking up cost you personally? You were made into the poster child for misinformation. What happened to your career when you decided you weren’t going to sit quietly?

I lost professorships, editorships, grants, consultancies—the whole list. But people were suffering and dying alone, and I couldn’t protect a résumé by leaving somebody else to take the hit. I’m healthy, I’m building again, and I wouldn’t change it. I think independent media grew because people learned they weren’t getting a straight story.

It’s good to see you again. Whatever people make of these arguments, you took a real professional beating for saying what you believed. I appreciate the courage, the ethics, and the willingness to keep having the conversation.